We didn't invent the weather (God did that)....just the weather blog...

Friday, October 28, 2011

Record October Snowfall On Way to Northeast Saturday...

All of the major computer models continue to come together in suggesting a major snow event for the Northeast on Saturday. It would only take 0.9 of an inch of snow to break the October record for New York City, and only 1.2 inches for Boston. Based on the output from the latest runs of the GFS and NAM computer models (as shown below), those records would be easily shattered (scale in inches at the bottom of each image):

That's a forecast of 2-4 inches of snow for New York City by the GFS, and a whopping 12-14 inches forecast by the NAM model!

I would like to await the morning and midday model runs and take a look at some other data and will have a more detailed post with my thoughts later today, but folks in this region need to be prepared for this storm. As I pointed out yesterday, it will be a heavy, wet snow, which will cause considerable problems with trees and power lines, even if snowfall totals are on the lower end of the scale.

We are very likely to see the same thing across a large part of the Northeast and interior New England tomorrow. Another element to consider is that there wasn't a whole lot of wind involved with the Denver and Rockies snowstorm, and there will be plenty of wind to add further stress to trees and power lines with this one coming up for the Northeast tomorrow...

The National Weather Service is also starting to come around to this way of thinking, with Winter Storm Watches in effect for much of this region tonight and into Saturday:

Watch for a more detailed update late this afternoon or early this evening which will include my personal thoughts on the likely snowfall accumulation. Please don't bookmark this thread as it will be an entirely new post...go to the homepage instead and take a look there for the update (or on the "10 Most Recent Posts" menu bar on the right hand side of the page).